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Action Girl Jacinta Rockich

Today I thought I’d just whip up a quick post with a tip and share a new image with you. Jacinta should be no stranger to you now if you follow my blog. When she was last here in Perth we teamed up on a number of different projects some of which you can see here and here. (highly recommend checking out those links)

In the last 6 months or so I have been actively doing more and more composites and learning all the ins-and-outs to a successful composite. It’s always been an interest of mine and I have had some jobs recently which have required it (such as the Top Shelf Entertainment photos) , and I can’t help but want to do more. It’s a great skill to have and it allows you to be more creative.

Now lets get to the point. This image above is a perfect example of mismatching focal lengths between the image of the subject and the image of the background. If there is something strange about this image that you can’t quite put your finger on, then this is probably it.

The image of the background was taken with a wide lens, probably somewhere around 16-20mm, and gives you the feeling of being right there in the location. The photo of Jacinta however, was not taken on a wide lens. The photo of Jacinta was taken with a longer lens, at 125mm! Obviously these are two very different focal lengths and they create much different perspectives. Take a photo of a person at 16mm and then take a photo of them at 125mm. You will notice it’s a very different look and feel. The perspective changes.

These two images were obviously not intended to go together. If they were, I would have photographed Jactina up close, with a wide lens. That way when I add her to the background, the perspective will match that of the background image, and she will look part of the scene. It would look more realistic.

Its also important to try keep your camera height/position fairly similar when you shoot the portrait, just as you did when you shoot the background. Sometimes you can get away with moving it around, but other times you need to keep it perfectly at the same height. If you don’t have the time to shoot you’re own backgrounds then you will need to carefully select your stock background images to match your subjects.

In the end I really liked the way I edited this image, so I changed it to a portrait so the wide background shot was less evident, and the image looks a lot more believable. The change in perspective of the two images isn’t any where near as obvious.

Jacinta Rockich Action Girl Composite

Below is a behind the scenes timelapse of the whole shoot thanks to my buddy Karl Pearce. We were in and out in under an hour from memory. It had to be a very quick shoot as the gym was in use by other people. Anyway hope you enjoy and hopefully I can share some more photos from this shoot soon.

Thanks to Evolution MMA for use of their Gym yet again!

Jacinta Action Girl BTS from karlos108 on Vimeo.

 

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Felix

The 5DMKIII has been amazing so far. I’m actually still half way through reading the manual because I’m really interested to find out just exactly what new bells and whistles are in this camera and how to use them. I don’t want to miss out on anything!  Up until now though I have pretty much relied on my Canon 5DMKII experience and my intuition to pick the MKIII up and get jobs done. In doing that, there’s no way I couldn’t notice the new focus system. It’s a world apart from the 5DMKII(2) and I’m so excited about it. It took a bit of fiddling around to work it out on my first couple of shoots but I’ve got it sussed out now and can’t wait to try some of the specialised modes.

So the first lucky group of people to have their photo taken on my brand spanking new 5DMKIII (3) were Felix. Felix are an awesome cover band in West Australia that have been frequenting the nightclub scene for over 10 years. If you follow my blog you may remember my last shoot with Felix back in December 2010 documented here: Fun with Felix and Flash

Now something important to note here, is that my 5DMKII(2) was on hand as a backup for this shoot should the 5DMKIII(3) spit the dummy or not perform in any way. It was a brand new camera and anything could have happen. Fortunately though, the only setback we experienced was that we couldn’t tether the 5DMKIII(3) to Lightroom. I only have Lightroom 3 installed on my Macbook Pro, which is not compatible with the new camera. Without upgrading the operating system on my (out-of-date) Macbook, I was unable to install Lightroom 4.1 which has support for the MKIII(3). So to continue with our tethered workflow, we used a 5DMKII(2) to shoot test shots tethered to the laptop, then we switched to the 5DMKIII(3) to take the actual snaps. It wasn’t necessary but we decided to do it. I tell you what that’s the benefit of having knowledgable assistants who can help conduct this sort of thing. Thanks Karl

Anyway,  hope you like the shot above, Felix do! Here’s a black and white version I rather like too…

Felix in Black And White

Remember there is a lot more to a black and white image then just converting it to grayscale. I have modified the tones in this image quite a lot to suit and to give it a lot more contrast.

So some quick first impressions of the 5DMKIII(3)? Well I love it. It’s noticeably heavier than the MKII(2) but lucky for me I like the weight. It helps my hands stay steady and its a more comfortable feeling to me. I don’t shoot long events anymore so I don’t need to worry about lugging it around with a long lens all day, which might take it’s toll a bit.

I love all of the new ergonomic changes except for moving the zoom button. I was so used to that button for stills and video that I still press it now automatically. The mode dial locking mechanism is great. I think it was introduced with the 7D and thank goodness for that. I’ve heard people complain about it and how it’s silly but they clearly haven’t spent enough time behind the camera. They put it there for a reason.

The screen is nice and big, just makes inspecting the images that little bit easier. The focus system is just wow. It really is such a huge jump forward from the MKII(2) and has so many options to play with. The bracketing feature is something I was really looking forward to and I cant wait to create some HDR type images I’ve been wanting to try for a while.

Anyway, go hire/buy oen and see for yourself. There’s so much more and there’s plenty of full reviews out there on the web.

Enjoy some behind the scenes action from my shoot with Felix…

 

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Blown Ford XB Coupe Burnout Car

This short film was shot over 2 years ago in early 2010. This was my first ever film but more importantly the films purpose was to test the capabilities of these new (at the time) Canon HDSLR cameras such as the 5DMKII, 7D and 1DMKIV. I was really excited about the video capabilities of these cameras as was the rest of the world. The results were pretty amazing for a stills camera and it has paved the way for all my videos ever since, it’s just a shame this one didn’t surface earlier.

I was actually photographing this car for Street Fords magazine to which it made the cover of but you can see more photos and read more about that on this old post; Street Fords Magazines October Front Cover Car, Photos you didn’t see! Kynan (car owner) said he was willing to do a burnout for us for the magazine and I couldn’t help myself but think of how great that would be to have on video. So 3 days before the photoshoot, I essentially turned it into a short film as well.

We were unable to complete this film to its full potential and add the finishing touches due to a number of unfortunate factors, so we had to sign-off on the project and move on. However I have still made a good effort to complete what you see below so those people involved can still see the results of their hard work. I hope you still enjoy it, its a neat little piece.

Burnout Film Crew

 

Director: Brodie Butler
Starring: Kierina Gaston
Camera Operators: Brodie Butler, A.J. Carter, Karl Pearce
Sound: Michael Fragomeni
Stunt Driver: Kynan Hall (car owner)
Assistants: Jay Wells, Karl Pearce
Car: Ford XB Coupe
Cameras Used:  5DMKII, 1DMKIV, 7D

Special Thanks to: Camera Electronic for their assistance and use of their brand new 1DMKIV.

Deepest apologies go out to Kynan and Kierina for the slow turnaround time on this one. :)

 

Here’s an image I took of the car that went off to Street Fords Magazine. See a few more of the pics here: Street Fords Magazines October Front Cover Car, Photos you didn’t see!

Blown Ford XB Coupe Burnout Car
If I get time I might post a few more behind the scenes photos and show the camera rigs we used later on.

B.

 

 

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Dan in The A-Team

Creating these composites for Top Shelf Entertainment was a lot of fun and for those of you who follow me on facebook you have probably seen a few of these already. There’s over a dozen composites done all up and I have been slowly sharing them on the blog, some with more info than the others. Here for example, is a post explaining how I created the photoshop composite for the Fireman image and some good tips on how to blend the colours from your background and your subject to produce more realistic composites.

This image above of Dan is an excellent example of this tip.  You can clearly see that the colours of Dan in the foreground have been matched to make him look like he’s a part of that scene. Without any blending of the colour balances between the background and the subject, Dan would look very out of place.
Below is probably my favourite composite of the bunch. Titled “Commando”, this composite features Gav sporting a rather large machine gun of some kind and a chain of bullets which I believe are actually upside down. (So a military friend tells me). The bullets probably don’t even match the gun but who cares!

Gav the Commando

The male subjects in all of these composites were shot on the same day in the same location. The setup was a very simply one which I have talked about before in this post.  It was a basic grey background and 3-4 lights. Here is a before and after image demonstrating what has happened to the original photo above.

Composite Before and After

Here’s a tip… Whenever you have to see your subjects feet in a composite, it adds an extra step that is so crucial to faking the image.  It’s important that their feet look like they are actually in the scene, so you need to take into account the shadows around their shoes, and of course the shadow of their body that may be cast as well!

I spend a lot of time burning in shadows around the shoes to make them look part of the scene. It can be tricky to get it right, but a bit of persistance and trial and error and you’ll get it.  A small additional trick of mine, is I like to make sure the lower half of the legs and feet are underexposed relative to the rest of their body. This way the viewers attention is focused AWAY from the feet. Check out this before and after image below to see the effect shadows have. The bottom is much more believable right?! (pay attention to the feet and under the truck)

Before and After burning shadows

We always knew there had to be a Naval Aviator from none other than Top Gun. This is a very popular show from Top Shelf Entertainment and has been around since the beginning of their stage shows. A large Navy ship stock image that I was able to use and had the right angle, was rather difficult to come by but I managed to secure this one below.

Top Gun Pilot

So what Lighting did I use? Well my trusty Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS battery powered pack was on hand as per usual. That pack goes with me everywhere and I absolutely love it to pieces. Not just the pack though, but the Rotalux softboxes that I can setup in just seconds are such a relief when working on location. Here’s a Behind The Scenes shot of the setup we used for these composites.

Behind The Scenes with Top Shelf Entertainment

So firing up top is the Elinchrom Rotalux 100cm Deep Octa, which is mounted on a C-Stand. To the left you will see the larger 135cm (53″) Octabox. This was being used for some general fill light and I was moving it around a fair bit.  Behind the subject at equal distances I had 80 x 120cm softboxes mounted to some old Visico studio strobes I have. These were creating the beautiful soft edge/rim lighting on my subjects.  The grey background was just to make the extractions in photoshop that little bit easier and we didn’t need to iron out every crease.  I had the background available so use what you’ve got right?

Of course in the foreground there you can see my 5DMKII with 70-200mm F2.8 L attached, and there is a Yongnuo RF-602 trigger in the hot-shoe triggering all the lights.

 

SWAT Officer

It’s amazing how much you learn and progress when you have to sit at a computer and create 12+ Photoshop composites to one deadline. It’s not something a lot of people would do unless they had a job come along that called for it. Like me. ;)  It has a massive benefit of really taking your skills and workflow to a new level and any new techniques you’re using really sink into your brain. The downside I find though, is that by the time you get to the last image, you already want to go back and re-do the first one! You’ve fine-tuned your style and workflow over days of retouching, and you want to go and apply the improvements to your first image.

Well I still love this image above, but it was my first of the batch and being the picky perfectionist that I am, I feel I could probably do it better now that I’m equipped with a few more tricks up my sleeve. It still works though and the client is super happy, so there’s no need to.

Hope you enjoyed these, I still have a couple more composites to show that I did for Top Shelf Entertainment, but you will have to wait a bit longer.

Brodie.

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Rob Zandvliet's 57 Chev featuring Jacinta Rockich

There’s an awesome little 5 page car feature in this months issue of Perth Street Car Magazine. It’s none other than Rob Zandvliet’s 1957 Chev! This car impressed the crowds at Motorvation earlier this year and picked up a few awards too. It was a great car to shoot and we had a lot of fun on the day. Thank for coming out Rob, and also Janelle and the kids it was great to meet you.

We were also very lucky to have international model Jacinta Rokich floating around town and have the time to come out on set with us for the day and shoot the feature. I think you will thoroughly enjoy this feature so get out to the newsagent and get your copy!

Videographer Ross Metcalf was with us once again to film the Behind The Scenes action and he did a great job as always. No more blabber from me, here is the result below! Watch it in 720p!!!

 

Publication: Perth Street Car Magazine (http://www.perthstreetcar.com) April 2012
Photographer: Brodie Butler ( http://www.brodiebutler.com )
Assistants: Karl Pearce, Jay Wells, Allessandia Montanna
Videographers: Ross Metcalf

Car: Rob Zandvliet’s 1957 Chev [FLAMIN 57]
Model: Jacinta Rokich
Video shot on 7D
Photos taken on 5DMKII

PERTH STREET CAR:
Twitter: www.twitter.com/perthstreetcar
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Perth-Street-Car-Magazine/119479901417967

BRODIE BUTLER PHOTOGRAPHY:
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/brodiebutler31
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/brodiebutlerphotography

 

Now check out the rest of the behind the scenes photos!

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Elinchrom Ringflash 1500

I get asked a lot about the Elinchrom lighting equipment that I use. In fact, it’s probably one of the most popular things on my blog so I thought it would be valuable adding this post on my first experience using the Elinchrom 1500 Ringflash in conjunction with my Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS battery pack.

I have been such a huge fan and preacher of soft light with most of my photography especially when it comes to people/portraits. That is… using larger light modifiers such as the Elinchrom 135cm Octabox and the Elinchrom 100cm Deep Octa to name a couple.  I have never got around to using a ringflash and I wasn’t really shooting anything that warranted it, until now.  Sure it may have come in handy for a lot of things, perhaps as a fill light for some of my work, but I have never considered using it as a main light source.

I always knew what a ringlight/ringflash was capable of though. It’s a very popular choice among fashion photographers, but it’s also been working its way into glamour, not to mention all kinds of other genres of photography.  So thanks to my friends at Camera Electronic I managed to get my hands on one for a week to try out.

Read on to see how I went!

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5DMKIII Review

The Canon 5DMKIII is the talk of the town at the moment and everyone is dying to know how it performs and what it can do. Mark Wallace from Adorama TV has uploaded a 20minute video review of the camera which is probably well worth a watch if you are looking to buy one of these 5DMKIII cameras.

Mark explains all the new features and talks about how it is a completely new camera with new technology, not just a 5DMKII with extra features. He shows some samples, some of which show the incredible low light performance of the camera which impressed me.

Anyway, take a look and make your own decision on the 5DMKIII.

 

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Australian Drifting GP T-Shirt image

Here’s one for the drifting fans. The Australian Drifting GP is not far away from getting underway in 2012 with the first round being held at Symmons Plains Raceway in Tassie on April 21st & 22nd.  For the 2012 season they are creating some new merchandise, the focus of which is a new t-shirt. The t-shirts will be white with a great big rectangular image on the front, and in case you haven’t already guess it’s the image above.

I had the pelasure of shooting the image. I had a brief and an idea of what they wanted, so we put it together and it turned out exactly how they hoped. The image above is obviously a colour rendition I put together, but the T-Shirt will be in black and white so will look a little more like this one below. The empty space in the image where the garage door is, will be used to accomodate the Australian Drifting GP logo. I look forward to the t-shirts release in a couple weeks!

Check out more on the official website: http://www.australiandriftinggp.com.au

Australian Drifting GP T-Shirt Black and white image

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2012 Harley Davidson 883 Iron Sportster

Want to WIN the Harley Davidson above? Well check out my post earlier in the week where you can enter for the chance to win this bike thanks to BOOM Magazine and Frasers Motorcycles. If you caught that earlier blog post you will know that I was tasked with photographing this Harley for the magazine. Now I’m going to show you how I did it and share some behind the scenes photos with you.

The image above you may recognise from the contents page.  Personally this was one of my favourites.

So here’s a BTS shot of the lighting setup below that was used for a majority of the shots. I’ll explain the gear used and the setup after the jump…

Harley Davidson 883 Iron Behind The Scenes Lighting Setup

Read on…

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Gulf Photo Plus 2012

Gulf Photo Plus is a huge event in Dubai each year which attracts the likes of David Hobby (Strobist), Joe McNally and the legendary Gregory Heisler to name a few. One of the fun parts is a little shootout that happens each year where they give 3 photographers an assignment to complete in just 20 minutes in front of an audience. Then the crowd votes for a winner. This year David Hobby went up against Gregory Heisler and Martin Prihoda. Its a fun little video, check it out.

 

Shoot-Out, GPP 2012 from gulf photo plus on Vimeo.

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Boom Magazine Issue 4 Front Cover

So here’s another front cover to the trophy room. I’ve been shooting a long time and I’ve been published a fair bit, but front covers are still a very exciting moment for me and something I’m always very proud of.

Frasers Motorcycles contacted me recently with a very exciting project they wanted me to be involved in. In collaboration with BOOM Magazine they were giving away a Harley Davidson Iron 883 motorcycle and they wanted me to photograph it for the front cover! So as Barney would say… “Challenge Accepted!”

The image above is obviously the front cover in question featuring the photo I took. For those who are yet to hear about BOOM Magazine, well…

BOOM Magazine is a new and exciting publication aimed at resource workers employed within the BOOMING Australian Resource Industry. Their mission is to create the best light hearted entertainment magazine available to all resource workers across Australia. The magazine mixes plenty of content such as interviews with international and national heroes as well as motor reviews, new fashions and investment tips. There is pretty much something for everyone.

The best part about this magazine is it’s FREE! Actually, even better than that, you can read the full magazine ONLINE! So click the link below and go find out more about the magazine!

Read the FULL March 2012 issue of BOOM Magazine Here!

CLICK HERE TO WIN A HARLEY DAVIDSON MOTORCYCLE!

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Check out this short video announcement from Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski about the new version of Adobe Photoshop CS6. You can download it from Adobe Labs here: Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta Download

Some highlights from Photoshop CS6:

  • Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.
  • Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop.* Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.
  • New and re-engineered design tools — Create superior designs fast. Get consistent formatting with type styles, create and apply custom strokes and dashed lines to shapes, quickly search layers, and much more.

You will also discover hundreds of new ways to work faster and with greater creative freedom and precision when you dive into Photoshop CS6 beta.

 

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Brodie Butler Photography - Sharing The Passion © 2010